This invention generally pertains to the art of food processing and, more particularly, to a system and a method for breaking individual pieces of frozen pizza from a single sheet containing multiple pieces of frozen pizza.
Frozen foods have allowed an enormous flexibility in production, preservation and transportation of food. By the virtue of modern freezing techniques, food items do not need to be cooked or produced immediately before consumption. Be it raw fruits and vegetables or prepared food, food items can be immediately frozen after harvesting or preparation and preserved for a long period of time. Once frozen, these food items can be transported over long distances to various distribution points such as grocery stores and supermarkets. Such flexibility has resulted in availability of various seasonal foods and vegetables all year long, and quick and convenient preparation of frozen pre-prepared food at home.
Pre-prepared frozen foods are always quick and convenient for the final preparation at home. One has to simply remove the food from the packaging and cook the food in a microwave or any other suitable oven. The food will be ready to enjoy within a matter of minutes. For more convenience, various frozen food products are sold with microwaveable/oven-safe containers within the food packaging. The food can be consumed directly from these containers after the heating/cooking has been completed. For all these reasons, frozen foods have been very popular with people with busy lifestyles. The procurement and preparation of ingredients, such as chopping, washing or mixing, and lengthy cooking times can be completely eliminated. Apart from a quick dinner at home, frozen foods are very popular as lunch at workplaces where lunch breaks are short. Due to their immense popularity, supermarkets and grocery stores carry several aisles of frozen foods.
Pizza is a ubiquitous prepared food item, its popularity shown by the vast number of pizza parlors in every town and city. Homemade pizza is particular popular in many households. However, it is cumbersome and time-consuming to prepare pizza at home. Furthermore, the preparation requires some preparation/cooking skills to make the dough of right consistency, to estimate the amount and proportion of various ingredients such as tomato sauce and toppings, to calibrate oven temperature at various stages of cooking, etc. For all these reasons, frozen pizza, wherein all of these aforementioned processes have already been undertaken using standard procedures, has become very popular.
Frozen pizza for retail sale is generally prepared in a factory setting using experimentally tested and proven methods. The amount of ingredients and the associate cooking process have been continually improved to give a flavorful and delicious product to the customer. Having said this, at least in the case of polygonal-shaped individual pizza pieces as opposed to a more conventional large round pizza pies particularly designed for feeding multiple individuals, it is not efficient to prepare the individual frozen pizza a single piece at a time. Instead it is much more efficient to prepare and freeze a sheet of the pizza and subsequently break apart the sheet to establish individual frozen pieces which then be packaged. By way of example, if prepared and frozen individually, pieces of pizza may jam, freeze together, and become disarranged when traveling through various stages of the production system.
Breaking off an individual piece from a frozen pizza sheet is aided by the brittleness of the frozen pizza. This breaking off process has been and certainly can be done manually, but this process, although considered quite effective in obtaining uniformly sized pieces, is time consuming and expensive. Therefore, the efficiency gain derived from preparing the pizza in a single sheet can be lost during the breaking process when done manually. With this in mind, there is a need for a mechanized system to effectively and efficiently accomplish the breaking of a frozen pizza sheet to individual pieces prior to packaging and shipping for sale to consumers.